


about the same

by RoseisaRoseisaRose



Series: Everyday I'm Drabbling [22]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Drabble, F/M, Silver Snow Route, nobody kisses but they want to, time gap fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:28:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28459032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseisaRoseisaRose/pseuds/RoseisaRoseisaRose
Summary: Hilda runs into an old friend in the midst of the war.Written for the Felannie discord drabble challenge; this week's prompt was "Reunion."
Relationships: Caspar von Bergliez/Hilda Valentine Goneril
Series: Everyday I'm Drabbling [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1649380
Comments: 5
Kudos: 17
Collections: Those Who Drabble in the Dark





	about the same

Hilda frowned and reviewed her options again. It was a difficult decision. She sighed, wishing she had some guidance.

“Which do you like better?” she asked the girl standing in front of her. “I’m between chocolate and strawberry.”

The girl looked up from her nails, which she had been examining closely. “They’re about the same, ma’am,” she said politely. “I don’t really care one way or another.”

Hilda sighed. It wasn’t the “ma’am” that bothered her – she flattered herself that she didn’t look a day over twenty-one, even if that wasn’t the reality anymore – but she recognized that tone from her own teenage years. Boredom. She was boring now.

If she’d actually been a day under twenty-one, she might have tried to convince the girl to ditch her shift at the food cart and explore the market with her. She was good at making friends; she’d done it before. But instead she just looked up at the signboard again and said, “I guess we’ll go with strawberry, then.”

The girl disappeared from the window with an uninterested nod, and Hilda turned to scan the market, suddenly feeling quite bored herself. The winter markets were always extra vibrant in Goneril. Even if she’d visited every shop and cart already that weekend, there was every-changing stock, and new gossip if you knew where to listen, and a completely new cast of people every day.

So she shouldn’t have been surprised to see him walking down the main thoroughfare, almost bumping into people as he scanned the signs mounted above the carts to proclaim that day’s stock.

But she was surprised.

“Caspar?” Hilda said, halfway between a gasp and a shout. When this didn’t catch his attention, she began waving her arms, and committed more fully to the shouting half. “Caspar! Caspar, is that you? It’s Hilda!”

He really did bump into someone then, losing his footing, and there was an exchange of effusive apologies before he finally made way over to her. Hilda tried not to stare too obviously as he made his way through the crowd towards her. She hadn’t seen Caspar since they were at school together. The last five years had been good for him, from what she could see.

“Hilda! I guess it makes sense you’re in Goneril,” Caspar said, beaming down at her. He was taller. She liked that. “Lucky chance, running into you, though!”

“It _is_ lucky, isn’t it,” Hilda said, smiling. She scanned Caspar’s face to see if he’d gained any sense for flirtation along with all that height, but sadly, he seemed as sincerely pleasant as always, and probably just legitimately liked her as a person. A pity. She buried the frown and changed the subject. “Are you in town to see my brother?” she asked. With the exception of Marianne, that was usually why she ran into old classmates these days, Empire or otherwise.

Caspar looked confused for a minute, and then seemed to remember who Holst Goneril was. “Ah! No, I’m on my way to Garreg Mach. Just passing through!”

Hilda frowned. Geography was boring and she didn’t care about it, but even she knew –

“You’re not coming from the Empire, I’m guessing?” she asked. “If you are, I’m afraid you’re terribly lost, Caspar.”

“No, uh, my father and I . . well, I’m coming from Almyra,” Caspar explained, jerking his thumb over his shoulder in a direction Hilda realized must at least vaguely point towards the mountains.

“Almyra?” Hilda exclaimed, surprised.

“Yeah!” Caspar said with a grin. He said something in Almyran that Hilda probably should have understood, but didn’t. It might have been “thank you,” or “good morning.” From the way he beamed at her she could tell he was proud to know it, regardless. “It’s a great place! I didn’t get as far as the capital, but I worked with this merchant family for a few months so I really got to see the countryside – really fantastic.”

“Have you been there ever since – since graduation?” Hilda asked. “Graduation” wasn’t exactly the right word for Alois shoving an axe in her hand and telling her to either flee the monastery or protect the village, but she couldn’t think of a better one.

“Nah, just the last couple of years,” Caspar said. “Ashe and I had some jobs out west at first, but I’ve kind of lost track of him. I spent a summer on the Rhodos coast, picked up some work on the Sreng border – you know, just kind of wandering around!” He frowned. “I kept meaning to talk to the knight of Seiros, but I’m still hoping my father – oh! Let me get that for you.”

The extremely bored food cart girl had reappeared with a strawberry crepe, and Caspar dug into his pockets and fished out a handful of coins. He carefully counted them out as Hilda took the crepe from the girl, and refused a bite when she offered him half.

“Is that why you’re going to Garreg Mach?” Hilda asked as they walked away from the food cart. “You won’t find any knights there, I don’t think. It’s been abandoned for years.”

“I – hm, I guess you weren’t in our class, but a few of us promised we’d meet up for the millennium festival,” Caspar explained. “I figured I’d see if anyone was attending.”

Hilda nodded. She’d heard about the reunion from Dorothea a few years back, when the former opera star stayed with her for a few months after fleeing the Empire. She hadn’t received a letter from Dorothea in a while, she suddenly realized. She wondered where she’d ended up.

“But anyway! That’s me,” Caspar said brightly. “What have you been up to? There’s been lots of skirmishes down by the Airmid, right?”

“Um. . . yes, I think so,” Hilda said. “I’ve mostly just been in Goneril, though.”

“Oh, I guess Fodlan’s Throat is still a big deal, war or no war,” Caspar said. “Two years in Almyra; you’d think I’d remember!”

Hilda laughed weakly. “I think my brother has his hands full, yes,” she said. She took another bite of the crepe, and wished she’d gotten chocolate.

In truth, she hadn’t picked up a battle axe in years, and she rarely left Goneril these days, even to visit Marianne. Holst was very cautious about what the Alliance’s next move should be – and for good reason, Hilda felt – and was very much of the opinion you should keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your troops closest of all.

When Hilda did leave the territory, it was for diplomatic visits within the Alliance, spending months at a time with unpleasant nobles who wanted things from Goneril. She laughed and flattered and flirted and convinced them to do what Holst wanted, and once they did what Holst wanted, she went home.

“Tell me, Miss Goneril,” a particularly overconfident and odious son of a baron had asked her a few months ago on a walk where she was terrified he might propose. “Who do you think is going to win this war – the Kingdom or the Empire?”

Hilda had laughed and smiled and told him she didn’t know one way or the other – in the end, they were about the same.

“What will you do, after Garreg Mach?” she asked suddenly. Caspar looked over at her in surprise.

“Huh. I haven’t really thought about it,” he said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “Depends on who’s there, I guess. I’m kind of hoping Petra will be there; I’d love to see Brigid and maybe she’ll want to go back? And if Ashe is there, I could always – oh. I think this is my inn.”

Hilda hadn’t realized how far they’d wandered outside the market square, but sure enough, they were standing across from a ramshackle inn a few blocks away from the center of town. She wrinkled her nose at it, both because it seemed like a distasteful place to spend the night and because it was cruelly taking Caspar away from her when they’d only just met again.

“How long are you in town for?” she asked, hoping to extend the conversation, or even meet again.

Caspar shrugged. “A couple of days, probably. I might leave tomorrow, actually. The festival isn’t until next month, but I was hoping I might find some work along the way, and it isn’t looking. . .” he trailed off, and Hilda could tell he was blushing just a little. “Listen, do you need me to carry – do you want to come in and – here, let me take that,” he finally said, reaching out and grabbing the napkin that had held Hilda’s crepe, still sticky with strawberry compote as he took it. He almost looked like he didn’t know what to do with it once he had it, as if he was used to carrying things with a lot more weight.

Hilda tilted her head. Caspar looked healthy, and happy, and she’d even go so far as to say handsome. But if she looked closer, she realized he had dark circles under his eyes, and that his jacket had been poorly patched and repatched by hand, and that he’d counted the money for her strawberry crepe very carefully when most of the suitors who bought her things these days barely gave their change a second look when it was handed back to them.

“Caspar, do you need” – what? Hilda thought to herself. Money? A place to stay? A job in Goneril’s army so he didn’t go wandering into an abandoned monastery looking something, anything other than what he had? “Do you need anything? Can I get you anything?” she finally asked. It was a big offer, especially for Hilda, but she figured if he wanted anything that sounded too time-consuming, she could always delegate the job to someone else.

But Caspar just laughed and waved his hand. “Nah, don’t worry about me, Hilda. I’m not _exactly_ sure what’s going to happen at the reunion, but – well, every day’s an adventure, right?”

He smiled so eagerly when he said it that Hilda felt silly for worrying about him. Instead, she smiled back.

“When you put it like that, it does sound rather fun,” she said. “You’ll have to come back to Goneril afterwards. Tell me all about it.”

Caspar’s grin widened. “Yeah! You can come with me to Almyra if I head that way again. If you’re not on the front lines, I mean. Hopefully the war won’t go on for much longer, right?”

“Right,” Hilda agreed, as if she had any idea how much longer the war would go on.

They stood in silence for a moment.

“I guess I should,” Caspar started.

“I won’t keep you any longer,” Hilda said at the same time.

They stopped, and looked at each other, silent for another moment. Then Caspar pulled Hilda into a hug, too fast and too hard and slightly sticky from strawberry filling. Hilda leaned into it and sighed, and it was over too soon.

She meant to tell Caspar goodbye or good luck or thank you, but he was gone before she could decide on which.

So instead, she wiped a bit of strawberry compote from the side of her mouth, and she turned to walk back home once again.

Later that night, she would tell Holst she wasn’t hungry for dinner, and it would worry him. She would also tell him she was leaving for her class reunion in a few weeks, and that would worry him more. She didn’t much care, in either case.

**Author's Note:**

> The most fantastical element of this fic is the idea of a crepe you can eat without a knife and fork. Do hand crepes exist? They should. I dream about them.
> 
> [ Catch me on twitter.](https://twitter.com/Rose3Writes)


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